I fell to my knees wearing nothing but a fig leaf hysterically sobbing. The tears were unfathomable and I couldn’t catch my breath. Someone I’d met that evening had his hand on my back trying to console me. ‘He’s here, I told him not to come and he’s here’ I cried.

I’d ran away from him upstairs to the backstage area where myself & the other performers were storing our belongings. I’d performed that evening in a dance piece that had travelled to Berlin for the night from Prague. I was really excited to perform and it ended up being one of the best runs I’d ever had. After the show I felt pumped & happy.

Earlier that week I was made aware that my ex was coming to Berlin. He told me he was visiting someone for the weekend. In the whole time we were dating he couldn’t come to Berlin because he was ‘too busy’, but now had managed to find time to visit a friend here. I felt hurt, I told him to have fun in the city, but mentioned that I was performing at this particular party, and urged him to find another place to go. I wasn’t ready to see him yet and I hoped that he would respect that. He didn’t.

I was queuing to get some pictures done with a friend. I’d already been partying for hours now and tbh thought I’d made a clean run without seeing him.

While in the queue for photos, he walks out. I’m face to face with him. My head spins, and I don’t remember what I said. He said something also, and then walked past me and upstairs. Everything I’d felt for months and months, everything I’d locked away and bottled out ran through my body and my entire nervous system collapsed like a house of cards. I ran after him upstairs. He was sat on a bench. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked him.

‘Sam come on, this party is the main one tonight in Berlin’ he said defensively.

‘WHY ARE YOU HERE?! I ASKED YOU NOT TO COME’ I begged him for an answer.

I was naked but a leaf.

His friend stood next to me laughing and smiling at him. I was humiliating myself. I’d been drinking all night, and this was exact reason I didn’t want to bump into him this way.

The whole thing is a blurred mess. I was begging him to tell me why he’d come. I knew it wasn’t to see me. And I knew it wasn’t out of spite. It was because he truly didn’t care about my feelings and just wanted to party, and that was what hurt the most.

Things escalated. I wouldn’t let things go. I’d lost my mind. His friends started getting involved, protecting him, trying to take him away from me. He wasn’t vulnerable, he was acting like an asshole, but I was alone and he wasn’t. I’d lost my friends when I ran after him.

His girlfriend started screaming at me. ‘ASSHOLE. FUCK YOU ASSHOLE’ she yelled at me.

I left and ran upstairs to put some clothes on. I found my way backstage and fell to my knees. Hysterical. My mind was melting. I was pouring out onto the stone floor. Tears like rivers.

I rushed to put my clothes on. I didn’t want to feel exposed anymore.

I sobbed and gasped for air. I was holding my chest. A performer friend was holding my back, trying to calm me down. Nothing could stop me or my heart from self destructing.

I got dressed and I went back downstairs. I found him and said I wanted to apologise for getting so angry. I was wiping the tears out of my eyes trying to explain that I wasn’t ready to see him and I thought he would’ve respected that. I was crying uncontrollably in front of everyone in the area. It was humiliating. His expression was like stone. I don’t remember any warmth from him, any energy he gave me to calm me down or comfort me was absent. He disappeared and his friend tried to console me. I didn’t want her around me. She was hugging me saying that he was an asshole anyway, and I shouldn’t be hurting over him. I said I loved him, she couldn’t understand me and everything I said, the words, disappeared into the air without meaning. I looked across the room and saw him with a group of guys. His eyes caught mine. Everything was hazy through the tears. His eyebrows furrowed and he turned his head away. I left his friend and made for the exit. It was daylight outside. 7am.

I walked out and wanted to walk straight into the road.

A part of my heart & soul had broken in there that night. I crumbled.

I made my way home, crawled into bed, and didn’t move for 24 hours. I didn’t eat, just drank water, and slept. My head felt like solid concrete, while at the same time felt like cotton wool. My eyelids were heavy like lead.

I’d had a full nervous breakdown and I now had to rebuild my mental & physical health from the ground up again.

I shouldn’t have allowed him to have this power over me. I shouldn’t have allowed him to push me into such a dark space. But seeing him that night was like being confronted with something so dark. It felt like PTSD. It was like I’d seen a ghost. He triggered me to fall to my knees. I was foetal in my response to seeing him. Confronting something I wasn’t strong enough for, because instead of respecting my boundaries, he lived for his own.

Our actions have huge effects on others, even when we don’t feel them ourselves. Maybe he’s selfish for turning up to a place I asked him not to come to, maybe I’m selfish for reacting the way I did, but either way, what ended up being a beautiful night was ruined by an encounter of two people who’d created evil from goodness.

The reaction he triggered in me is something so unforgivable of him or of myself, that I need to remove it, from my universe.

Two ships passing in the night.

Battleships.

Going back to their own waters.